1. Technical Field
This invention relates to processing electronic mail messages based upon the relationship between the sender and the recipient. More specifically, the invention relates to establishing rules based upon the relationship and processing the messages responsive to the rules.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Electronic mail (hereinafter referred to as “email”) is a form of digital message exchange, and more specifically is the transmission of messages over a communications network. Each message includes content, an author address, and at least one recipient address. With the proliferation of email, there have been issues with electronic junk mail and other forms of unsolicited emails. It is known in the art, that processing of unsolicited emails and junk mail messages can become burdensome and occupy network bandwidth.
A variety of tools and techniques have been developed to mitigate receipt and processing of unsolicited email and junk mail. These tools are limited to processing email messages based upon the sender's name, the subject line, and/or message content. Based upon the limited processing available, the tools may recognize a message as unsolicited and will either remove the message from the recipient's inbox or employ protocols to divert the message to a location different from the recipient's inbox. FIG. 1 is a prior art flow chart (100) demonstrating a process for classifying email. Upon receipt of the email by the server (102), the following fields of the message are identified: sender address (104), sender name (106), and subject line (108). Based upon the information in these three fields, it is determined if the email should be classified as junk mail (110). A positive response to the determination at step (110) assigns the junk mail classification to the email and places the email in a junk mail folder, which is a folder separate from the inbox and accommodates all junk mail messages (112). Conversely, following a negative response to the determination at step (110), it is determined if the email is an unsolicited message (114). Similar to the determination at step (110), a positive response to the determination at step (114) assigns the unsolicited message classification to the email and places the email in an unsolicited message folder, which is a folder separate from both the inbox and junk mail folder. The inbox is referred to herein as a folder or directory in a recipient's application that receives and holds an email. In one embodiment, all unsolicited messages are never received in the recipient's electronic mail system. Following a negative response to the determination at step (114), the email is sent to the recipient and is received in the inbox of the recipient (118). Similarly, in one embodiment, all messages are received in the recipient inbox and followed by processing for junk or unsolicited message status, after which they are removed from the inbox. Accordingly, the prior art tools separate email into at least two categories and limit placement of email determined to be neither unsolicited message nor junk in the recipient's inbox.
The prior art tools do not address categorizing email that is not unsolicited email or junk. While it is beneficial to remove unsolicited message and junk mail from a recipient's inbox, issues remain with classifying solicited messages that are actually received by the recipient. Different received email messages may have different levels of importance. More specifically, some messages may be determined to require an immediate read, and others may require different levels of response times. Levels of importance may be appropriate in both business and non-business environments. Current email programs allow automated processing based on sender's email address or keywords in the subject line, but do not permit processing email based on the relationship between the sender and recipient. For example, with today's email programs, you could write a rule that states if a message arrives from my manager's email address, forward it to my pager. However, this rule is not based upon the semantic relationship between the two parties and it will not work if you get a new manager or if you transfer to a new department. Accordingly, there is a need for applying a relationship of the sender to the user to classify the received message and to convey the message to the recipient based upon the importance of the message and/or the semantic relationship of the sender and recipient.